


A Criminal Strain in the Blood

by orphan_account



Series: Flash Fiction from Baker Street [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Twins, in which jim moriarty may die but james moriarty still lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-07
Updated: 2012-07-07
Packaged: 2017-11-09 08:34:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/453484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You are me and I am you.<br/>That is the first lesson.<br/>Jim and James are born in the midst of a sweltering afternoon during Northern Ireland’s hottest August in decades.  Jim is seven minutes younger than James.  They both weigh in at precisely 2.5 kilos, hale and hearty for twins.  James is already exhibiting signs of heterochromia.  The left is the same as his brother’s blackened brown; the right is a tawny gold.</i>
</p><p>The Moriarty boys live and work as one.  They are not to be trifled with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Criminal Strain in the Blood

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from Holmes's description of Professor Moriarty in The Final Problem: " _A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers._ "

You are me and I am you.

That is the first lesson.

Jim and James are born in the midst of a sweltering afternoon during Northern Ireland’s hottest August in decades.  Jim is seven minutes younger than James.  They both weigh in at precisely 2.5 kilos, hale and hearty for twins.  James is already exhibiting signs of heterochromia.  The left is the same as his brother’s blackened brown; the right is a tawny gold.

At age three, Uncle Matthias teaches the boys the basics of field dressing.  The knives are unwieldy in their diminutive hands, but they take pleasure in skinning the rabbits ( _oryctolagus cuniculus_ ) from their snares while the last of the life drains from their bodies.  No one mentions Da and why he’s not around to teach them how to hunt, to survive.  Matthias tells Jimmy and James they are already survivors without him.

Unless you’re looking them directly in the eyes, the Moriarty boys are a perfect pair.  A matching set.    Jim writes with his left hand and James with his right, but they’ve made a study of handwriting and can switch with each other at will.  They like the same foods.  They read the same books.  They plan the same hunts.  They examine the same animals. They con the same teachers and psychologists.  They terrify the same mother.




For all intents and purposes, they are one child in two bodies.  The split only serves to allow for more work, more research, simply _more_.

That is the first lesson.

If you are not Jim/James, you are the enemy.

That is the second lesson.

The other children are rightly terrified of the Moriarty boys.  Jim and James charm the nuns, but make no such effort to ingratiate themselves with the peons in pleated skirts and pressed trousers.  The boys are so very _bright_ and even if money is a problem, Sister Agnes suggests, surely there’s a school more suited to children of Jim and James particular talents that might offer a scholarship.  There is much handwringing from Calliope Moriarty, ostensibly a widow who moved to Dublin after the hunger strikes.  That is when Jim and James know she is one of _them_.

They arrive in their secondhand traveling clothes at King’s Cross Station.  James Sr. is waiting, his bespoke suit a study in clean lines of smoky charcoal.  The eyes that peer down at Jim and James are the same tawny gold as James’s right eye.  A driver waits behind the wheel of the idling black town car, his thick neck and loose-fitting trousers giving away the true nature of his job before the Moriarty boys are settled in the backset.

James Sr. entertains a large number of attractive women and less-attractive but well-funded men at the flat.  During the summers, the Moriarty’s descend on their large estate in Sussex.  Jim and James are once again free to experiment on the local wildlife (Cook screams when she finds the carefully vivisected corpses of three lovely _lutra lutra_ , their shiny pelts and peculiar tails removed for preservation).  This is when James Sr. sends them to a second round of psychologists and the boys know that he is not we.  James Sr. will be taken care of soon enough.  The doctors are easily fooled, but Jim and James are bored.

Everyone else is the enemy.

That is the second lesson.

At all costs avoid boredom.

This is the third lesson.

By university, Jim and James have very little book learning left to do.  They consider studying history or politics for a change of pace, but it’s dulldulldulldulldull and they simply cannot abide the sheer boredom of their lectures.  Jim still has a fondness for circuit boards and programming, James for astrophysics.  They spend a gleeful afternoon hacking into databases at NASA and CERN.  Oxford holds no interest, and so Jim and James leave the country and set out to find something more stimulating.

Soon their web of everyone against Jim/James becomes more convoluted.  They began to collect things and people of use.  There’s a charming woman with raven hair and bloodred lips like something out of a fairytale.  They’re even more pleased when they learn she knows how to dole out pleasure and pain in equal measure to get what she desires.  And oh they spend a pleasant two weeks learning all her most indulgent methods.  There’s an acrobat with a coke habit who will do anything to impress the Moriarty boys, even if the divulgence of trade secrets means he winds up in cold storage, identifiable only by the tattoo on the sole of his foot.  Jim’s favorite is a vapid reporter with red hair, blind ambition, and a poisonous pen.  James’s favorite is a disgraced sniper with a steady hand and no moral compass to speak of.

They collect them all like cards in a deck, shuffle and spread them out across the globe: anything to stave off the boredom.

That is the third lesson.

Never underestimate your playthings.

This is the final lesson for Jim.  It is the first that James must learn alone.

James has little to say, except to instruct Sebastian: _find him, leave him at least partly alive, and bring him to me.  I want to see the lifeblood leave Sherlock Holmes_.

Never underestimate your playthings.  If you do, make them pay.

That is the final lesson.

**Author's Note:**

> The idea that there's more than one Moriarty certainly isn't new. I got it into my head that they were twins, and that the one left living after Reichenbach wouldn't let sleeping dogs lie. Also, this is the first Sherlock fic I've ever written without John. It was _weird_.


End file.
